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1877 
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The Relations of Learning and Religion. 



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ADDRESSES 



INAUGURATION OF 



Rev. Julius H. Seelye, 



PRESIDENCY OF AMHERSUCOLLEGE, 



June 27, 1S77. 



PUHI.ISHFD RY VOTF. OF TIIK TRUSTEES. 



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SPRINGFIELD, MASS.: 

CLARK W BRYAN & COMPANY, PRINTERS. 

1877. 



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The Relations of Learning and Religion, 



ADDRESSES 



INAUGURATION OF 



Rev. Julius H. Seelye, 



PRESIDENCY OF AMHERST COLLEGE, 



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June 27, 1877. 




Published by Vote of the Trustees. 



SPRINGFIELD, MASS.: 

CLARK W. BRYAN & COMPANY, PRINTERS. 
1877. 



1 



PREFATORY NOTE 



The public exercises in connection with the Inau- 
guration of Rev. Julius H. Seelye as the fifth Pres- 
ident of Amherst College, took place at the College 
Hall, Amherst, Wednesday, June 27, 1877, at three 
o'clock, P. M., and consisted of Prayer, by Rev. 
Edmund K. Alden of Boston; the address, on the 
part of the Trustees, by Rev. Roswell D. Hitchcock 
of New York, and the address of President Seelye ; 
followed by the singing of an ode, composed for the 
occasion, by Rev. Albert Bryant of West Somerville, 
Mass. The addresses are herewith published by vote 
of the Trustees. 



ADDRESS TO PRESIDENT SEELYE 

BY 

REV. DR. HITCHCOCK, 



Reverend and Honored Sir : 

The whole College bids you welcome to its 
highest seat. Trustees, alumni, teachers and stu- 
dents are all united and earnest in the persuasion of 
your eminent fitness for this new position, united and 
earnest also in the expectation of your eminent suc- 
cess. You are no stranger here, and nothing is 
strange to you. Made President of the College 
after eighteen years of constant and conspicuous 
service in one of its departments of instruction, the 
element of novelty is almost wholly wanting. Re- 
taining the chair in which you have earned your 
fame, you now merely add to its familiar duties that 
general oversight of the institution, with which you 
must be almost equally familiar. 

You are also well across the threshold of the new 
office. The class that graduates to-morrow carries 
with it the memory of your first presidential year. 
And neither you, nor we, have anything to ask for 



now but a repetition of this year's record for many 
and many a year to come. 

The College is happy, and proud, to be led at last 
by one of its own alumni. Your four predecessors 
were all providential men. The four administrations 
lie in our history like so many geological deposits. 
The future need not contradict, nor criticise, the past; 
but a robust vitality instinctively asserts itself in better 
and better forms. We salute you, therefore, at once 
as the fifth, and as the first of our Amherst presidents. 

To-day we promise, and we promise not, a new de- 
parture. There wdll be some new methods, and, we 
trust, new vigor, but essentially no new aim. Insti- 
tutions, of whatever sort, are partly made, but for the 
most part they grow ; so that no two institutions are, 
or ever ought to be exactly alike. This institution has 
its own most pronounced and most sacred traditions. 
Its original design, the training of Christian ministers, 
was soon widened to take in the broadest and most 
liberal culture. Sharp, solid, generous, manly Chris- 
tian scholarship is now, and long has been our watch- 
word. It is a very marked and precious feature in 
our history that, from the very beginning, science and 
religion, the science even of nature, have been equally 
emphasized. Our first president, and our third, were 
both of them distinguished for their zeal and for their 
attainments in natural science. In the great conflict 
that is now upon us, the conflict between science and 
religion, this institution has nothing to fear — I might 



almost say it has nothing to learn. It is well armed, 
and looks forth boldly in both directions. It dares to 
say with one of old, " Veritas, a quocunque dicitur', a 
Deo est.'' And then it goes on to say, with Pious of 
Mirandola, " Philosophia quoerit, theologia invenit, re- 
ligio possidet veritaiem." 

The standard of required attainments in order to 
admission to college has been of late very consider- 
ably raised. Something more may still be done in 
the same direction. But, in my judgment, we have 
very nearly reached the proper limit. To require 
much more than is now required, will be to make, or 
try to make, the college into something else than a 
college. And the result will be that we shall lose our 
college, and get no university in place of it. Post- 
graduate courses of instruction may, however, be or- 
ganized, and so we shall be able to push our brightest 
scholars to their utmost. 

It must not be forgotten that the three grand sta- 
ples of a liberal culture are Mathematics, Greek and 
Latin ; and in this order. No mountain of facts can 
make any man a great scholar. His mind must be 
trained like a wrestler's muscles. He must have 
insight. He must master laws and principles. He 
must see the forest in spite of its trees. 

The real instinctive scholar is also instinctively a 
gentleman. But scholarship may be acquired ; and 
so, too, may the gentlemanly habit. It is one of the 
good signs of our time that so many of the old bar- 



barous customs of college life have already been out- 
grown. Let none of them be spared. The memory 
of them is all we need for our cabinet of fossils. Let 
this institution be known as one within whose pre- 
cincts no freshman is ever outraged, no son of poverty 
despised, no faithful instructor insulted, and it shall 
wear a crown of glory among its rivals 

But this occasion does not belong to me, nor to 
those whom I represent. We have given the college 
its new President, and now he must speak for himself 
and for it. 

Henceforth, my dear sir, the college is yours in a 
pre-eminent and peculiar sense. We have no painful 
solicitude about its future. Your scholastic training, 
though ample, has not been exclusive. You have 
had recent experience in quite another sphere. You 
have also been round the globe, and stood face to 
face with civilizations older than our own. You 
will inspire, encourage and illustrate here the broad- 
est culture. We shall send you raw boys, to be sent 
back to us accomplished Christian scholars and gen- 
tlemen. 

And so, with good heart and hope we hand you 
these insignia of your high office. We put into your 
keeping the charter, the seal and the keys of the col- 
lege. And you we put, and the college with you, 
into the keeping of Him who only is wise, and good, 
and great, the end of all science, and Lord of the 
rolling years. 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



Amherst College was founded by Christian people 
and for a Christian purpose. It was an association of 
Christian ministers, who, at Shelburne, May 10, 1815, 
started measures for the foundation of the College, 
and it was the Christian men and women of Franklin 
and Hampshire Counties by whom these measures 
were carried to their consummation. The inspiring 
sources of the whole movement were devotion to 
Christ and zeal for His kingdom. When the first 
college building was dedicated, and its first president 
and professor were inaugurated, September 18, 1821, 
" the promotion of the religion of Christ " was de- 
clared to be the special object of the undertaking, 
and the prayers which were then offered for " the 
guidance and protection of the great Head of the 
church, to whose service," — in the lanij^uao-e then 
used, — " this institution is consecrated," have been 
since repeated with undiminished earnestness and 
faith, on every similar occasion. At the first meeting 
of the trustees after the legislative act of incorpo- 
ration, steps were taken for the organization of a 
Christian chinxli, which, when formed, was named the 



10 

Church of Christ in Amherst College, as indicative 
no less of the Catholic than the Christian spirit which 
should here reign. 

It was the original purpose, from which the friends 
and guardians of the college have never swerved, 
that there should be here furnished the means for the 
highest attainable culture in science and literature 
and philosophy. The college was not to fall below 
the best in its intellectual provisions. But the con- 
stant and chief aim of its founders was to establish 
here an educational institution in which Christian 
faith might dominate, and whose power might sub- 
serve the knowledge of Christian truth. From Presi- 
dent Moore, in whose saintly zeal the earliest students 
of the college found both instruction and inspiration, 
to President Stearns, whose purity and faith sur- 
rounded his presence like a halo, ennobling him and 
enlightening and elevating all who had contact with 
him, the controlling purpose of the college has been 
to provide the highest possible educational advan- 
tao-es, and to penetrate these with a living faith in 
the Lord Jesus Christ, and a supreme devotion to His 
kingdom. 

In all this Amherst College is not peculiar. Other 
institutions of learning have been founded and car- 
ried forward with the same purpose. Indeed, here is 
the source from which directly and obviously, or in- 
directly, all our influences of education flow. The 
schools of the Christian world trace their actual 



11 

historical origin to the Christian church. As early as 
the third century we find it recognized as a Christian 
duty to plant schools for the nurture of the children 
and youth wherever churches were planted. In sub- 
sequent centuries, by recommendations and decrees 
of councils and synods, the attention of Christian 
ministers was everywhere directed to the establish- 
ment of town and village and parochial schools " be- 
cause," — as the third council of Lateran in 1179 
decreed, — " the church of God as a pious mother is 
bound to provide opportunity for learning." It was 
under this influence that England, in the time of 
Edward 111., was called the land of schools, every 
cathedral and almost every monastery having its 
own. 

The precise time and way in which the oldest 
universities of Europe arose cannot be definitely ascer- 
tained, but the evidence is clear that they directly 
owed their origin to the church, and were subject to 
her control. The University of Paris, the oldest of 
them all — with the possible exception of that at 
Boloo-na — was designated as " the first school of the 
church," and the oldest public documents extant 
, respecting it are ecclesiastical decrees for its manage- 
ment. The thousands on thousands who flocked to 
these seats of learning during the Middle Ages, exceed- 
ino" by far, — whether we take their actual number or 
their relative proportion, — the classes since attending 
the same, were drawn thither, — so far as we can 



12 

judge from the results, — not so much by zest for 
study as by zeal for the service of the church. When 
kings and emperors added their efforts to those of 
synods and councils for the advancement of learning, 
as when Charlemagne extended schools through his 
empire for the education of the clergy, or Alfred, ac- 
cording to the old Warwick chronicler, erected the 
first three halls at Oxford in the name of the Holy 
Trinity, they sought for learning as the handmaid of 
religion, because they saw that religion was the con- 
servator of the state. When the Reformation arose, 
its great religious quickening was a wide-reaching 
inspiration toward education, as well. The great 
reformers were well nigh as zealous in the work of 
education as in that of religious purification. " It is 
a grave and serious thing," says Luther in his Ad- 
dress to the Common Councils of all the Cities of 
Germany in Behalf of Christian Schools, written in 
1 524, " affecting the interest of the kingdom of. Christ 
and of all the world, that we apply ourselves to the 
work of aiding and instructing the young. I entreat 
you in God's behalf not to think so lightly of this 
matter, as many do." Melancthon equaled Luther 
in his zeal and surpassed him in his practical activity 
for the advancement of learning. He wrote text- 
books on dialectics, rhetoric, physics and ethics, which 
were more widely used in schools than any other 
books of his time. No man, not even Erasmus, con- 
tributed so profoundly to the culture of the age as 



13 

did Melancthon. It was through a visitation of the 
churches and schools of the electorate of Saxony in 
1527, in which more than thirty men were engaged 
through a whole year, that the so-called Saxon school 
system, wiiich may properly be termed the basis of 
the modern German system of education, was drawn 
up by Luther and Melancthon. The great universi- 
ties of Konigsberg, Jena, Halle, Giittingen, and after- 
wards Berlin, ow^ed their existence directly to the 
reformation, while those of Tiibingen, Wittenberg and 
Leipsic received their character and power from the 
same source. 

All our educational frame-work owes its corner- 
stone and informing law to the interests of religion. 
Our oldest college, founded less than sixteen years 
after the landing of the Pilgrims, and six years after 
the first settlement of Boston, had, says Johnson in 
his Wonder - Working Providence, " its end firmly 
fixed on the glory of God and good of all his elect 
people the world throughout in vindicating the truth 
of Christ and promoting His glorious kingdom." The 
original charter of Yale college declares the motive 
for the undertaking to be " a sincere regard to and 
zeal for upholding and propagating of the Christian 
Protestant religion." The first order made upon this 
continent for the establishment of common schools, 
was issued by the united colonies of Connecticut in 
1644, and copied and re-declared by the colony of 



14 

Massachusetts Bay in 1647, in these remarkable 
words : 

" It being one chiefe project of y*ould deluder, 
Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y® Scrip- 
tures, as in form*" times by keeping y™ in an iniknowne 
tongue, so in these latf times by pswading from y® 
use of tongues, y* so at least y® true sence & mean- 
ing of y*" originall might be clouded by false glosses 
of saint seeming deceivers, y* learning may not be 
buried in y® grave of o'' fath''^ in y® church & com- 
onwealth, the Lord assisting o'" endeavors, — 

" It is therefore ord^'ed, y* ev^'y towneship in this 
jurisdiction aff y^ Lord hath increased y"" to y" num- 
ber of 50 household'^, shall then forthw*^ apoint one 
w^'^in their towne to teach all such children as shall 
resort to him to write & reade, whose wages shall be 
paid eith"" by ye® parents or masf® of such children, 
or by y*' inhabitants in gen'^all, by way of supply, as 
y® maior- p^'t of those y* ord'' y® prudentials of y® towne 
shall appoint; provided, those y* send their children 
be not oppressed by paying much more y" they can 
have y^ taught for in oth' townes ; & it is furth"" or- 
dered, y* where any towne shall increase to y® numb"^ 
of 100 families or household", they shall set up a 
gramer schoole, y® m'" thereof being able to instruct 
youths so farr as they may be fited for y® university, 
provided, y* if any towne neglect y® pformance hereof 
above one yeare, y* every such towne shall pay 5<£ 
to y*" next schoole till they shall p'forme this order." 



15 

Though all our colleges and systems of common 
schools do not start so obviously from a religious im- 
pulse, though it is claimed for some that their source 
and aims are purely secular, there has not yet ap- 
peared any prominent and long continued educational 
influence, among us or elsewhere, wholly dissociated 
from a religious origin and inspiration. " I have 
always despaired," said a superintendent of public 
schools in Ohio, " of maintaining even a good com- 
mon school, where there is not a Christian church to 
help it." 

Is this wide-reaching^ relation of relig-ion and edu- 
cation after all only accidental and temporary, or has 
it a rational ground, which is therefore abiding and on 
which, if we are wise, we shall still continue to build ? 
There is at the present time no graver or more practi- 
cal question relating to education than this, and none 
also on which more hasty and inconsiderate answers 
apt to be given, perhaps, on either, side. It will help 
us to a clear view and correct conclusion, if we divest 
ourselves at the outset of the very common but quite 
superficial notion that there is an inherent law of 
progress in human nature, by which it is constantly^ 
seeking and gaining for itself an improved condition. 
Such a notion is not supported by the facts, either of 
history or of human nature itself. The fxcts of his- 
tory certainly show a far more prominent law of de- 
terioration than of progress. Over by far the larger 
portion of the globe to-day, and with by fjxr the larger 



16 

portion of mankind, retrogression reigns instead of 
progress, and this is true as we look back through all 
ages. Progress not only has never been universal, 
but so far as records reach, it has always been con- 
fined to the few ; wherever yet its fertilizing streams 
have flowed, they have been rivers in narrow beds, 
never covering; the earth as the waters cover the sea. 
Moreover, in unnumbered instances where progress 
has begun, it has died out and disappeared. The evi- 
dences of this are as striking as they are mournful. 
No historical fact is clearer than that human prog-* 
ress has never revealed any inherent power of self- 
perpetuation. Arts, languages, literatures, sciences, 
civilizations, religions, have, in unnumbered instances, 
deteriorated and left a people to grope in the shadow 
of death, whose progenitors seemed to rejoice in the 
light of life. There is as yet no induction of facts 
sufficiently broad, if we had nothing else, to warrant 
the conclusion, that any progress that the world now 
knows is certain to be permanent or likely to be uni- 
versal. 

But 'these facts of history would not surprise us 
if we did but see that they represent, on a broad 
scale, only a deep-seated fact in human nature itself. 
Strange, and startling, and sad as it is, the fact will not 
be doubted by a close observer, that there is a much 
deeper impulse in human nature to throw away its 
privileges than to retain them. Endow a man with 
any possessions you please, give him any kind or de- 



17 

gree of culture, let his culture be clothed and crowned 
with virtue till he shines like the sun, and lesser stars 
fade in his light, and then leave him to himself; take 
away the restraints and incentives of society, free his 
thoughts from the claims of God and duty, and let 
only the dictates and desires which are bounded by 
his individual will control him, and how long before 
his glory will be gone, and you might search in vain 
among the ashes of his wasted privileges for a single 
spark of his former fire ? The influences which per- 
petuate a man's culture, which give it strength and 
jxrowth and fruitfulness are not of the man's own 
creation. They are not his in any sense, save as he 
receives them, and he can no more retain them than 
can he retain to-morrow, the light of the siwi by 
which he walks to-day, and without whose continued 
shining he walks in darkness. 

And it is no more within the power of human nature 
to originate than it is to perpetuate its progress. 
There are many current notions upon this point which 
a clear discernment would at once dispel. We crudely 
talk as though human nature by the evolution of its 
own inherent forces could lift itself from a lower to 
a higher plane, but in no case was this ever done. 
The historical fact has always been that the higher 
has first descended upon and breathed its inspiration 
into the lower before the latter has shown any im- 
pulse to improvement. In our processes of education, 
the higher schools have not grown out of the lower 



18 

and do not rest upon them, but the higher school is 
historically first, and the lower one is not its precursor 
but its product ; there is no law of evolution by 
which the common school grows up into the college, 
for as an historical fact, the college is actually first, 
and gives birth to the common school. It is not by 
the lower education of the many that we come to 
have the higher education of the few, but the exact 
converse of this is the universal rule. 

A great man who leads his nation or his age to a 
higher state is no mere product of forces belonging 
to the time of his appearance. What forces belong- 
ing to his time produced Moses, or Confucius, or 
Sakya-Muni, or Zoroaster, or Socrates ? A great man 
is a God-bestowed gift upon his time, giving to his 
time a new day for which there is no approaching 
dawn, and whose coming is as unexplained by the 
conditions when he came, as it was unexpected by 
the people to whom he came. They are lifted by 
him to a higher plane, because he stands already, and 
from the outset, on a higher plane than they. So far 
as records of history go, no nation ever originated its 
own progress. No savage has ever civilized himself 
The lamp which lightens one nation in its progress, 
has always been lighted by a lamp behind it. 

But whence, then, does progress originate, and by 
what means is it perpetuated ? A general answer to 
this question is not difficult. Divesting ourselves of 
all theories which prejudge the facts, and looking 



19 

only at the facts themselves, it is quite clear that the 
prime impulse toward human improvement, is not 
any desire for what may be called the arts or advan- 
tages of civilization. These have no attraction to a 
people which does not already possess them. They 
are not attractive to a savage ; on the contrary, he 
finds them repulsive. This, in fact, is what makes 
him a savage, that he hates the very condition in 
which the civilized man finds his joy. He is con- 
scious of but few wants, and these of the simplest 
sort, which it needs but few efforts to satisfy ; and 
the gifts of civilization for which he feels no necessity, 
offer him, therefore, no advantages which he can ap- 
preciate, and can excite in him no efforts to obtain 
them. The first mipulse to any improvement of a 
man's outward condition must come from the quick- 
ening of some inner inspiration, without which all the 
blandishments of civilization could no more win a 
savage to a better state than could all the warmth of 
the sun woo a desert to a fruitful field. 

But the seed of this inner quickening can never 
be planted in the soul of the savage by advancing 
knowledge. He does not desire knowledge any 
more than he desires the power which knowledge 
brings. He is not only indifferent to his ignorance 
but he is unconscious of it, for ignorance is first of all 
and always ignorant of itself. An ignorant people 
has never yet leaped from its ignorance into advanc- 
ing knowledge without some other impulse than the 



20 

knowledge furnished. In order that knowledge may 
be attractive and thus attained, the soul must be kin- 
dled by some inspiring sentiment, and thus we find 
as an historical fact that the quickened heart is the 
precursor of the enUghtened intellect and the origin 
of progress with any people. 

In the history of human knowledge, science is 
always preceded and quickened by art, yet art does 
not spontaneously originate. While the mother of 
science, she herself is the child of religion. These 
sentiments of the soul in which art finds its fountain, 
and from which all the streams of science spring, are 
the deep convictions of the soul's religious wants and 
its religious capabilities. Take to illustrate this any 
of the arts which mark the culture of a people and 
trace their origin and history. It might be crudely 
supposed that architecture arose from a natural ne- 
cessity man has of furnishing himself a shelter and a 
dwelling-place. But allowing this natural necessity 
to exist, and supposing it to have found its natural 
expression, the result need have no more resemblance 
to architecture than have the huts of a Hottentot 
kraal to the palaces of Vienna and Versailles. Man's 
natural want of a shelter can be supplied, and if we 
look simply at numbers, is supplied by a great major- 
ity of men, with as little beauty and as little archi- 
tectural skill as are found in the habitations of the 
ant or the beaver. But, aside from this, the truth is 
that the history of architecture does not begin with 



21 

the history of human homes. The oldest remains of 
architecture are symbols and monuments of religious 
faith. Columns and colonnades and temples, struc- 
tures erected for worship, or to symbolize some object 
or doctrine of religion, — these, and not human dwell- 
ings, are the earliest indications we have of the dawn 
of architecture. Looking now, not in the light of 
any theory which prejudges the facts, but only at 
the facts themselves, we are obliged to say that it 
was not the construction of his dwelling-house that 
taught man to build his temple, but exactly the 
other way. 

The same is true with sculpture, painting, poetry, 
music. It was a religious impulse which gave to all 
these their first inspiration. The oldest monuments 
we possess of any of these arts are associated with 
some religious rite or faith. But more than this, we 
must also notice the undoubted fact that the arts 
have grown in glory just as the religious sentiment 
has grown in power. The j)eriod of decadence in art 
is always indicated by a prior decline in religion. 
There is no high art, as I suspect we may also say 
there is never a great genius uninspired by some sort 
of a religious sentiment and impulse. As the seed 
whose growth shall fill the fields with plenty, and 
clothe the earth with beauty, slumbers in the earth 
in darkness, and with no signs of life till the warmth 
of the sun comes nigh, so all the thoughts of men, 
with whatever capabilities of art and science en- 



22 

dowed, lie dormant in the soul till some divine com- 
munication stirs the soul with the sense of its ac- 
countability and its sin, and kindles it with a longing 
for the favor of its God. If, as all the facts would 
indicate, even if we had no evidence from Scripture, 
man originally started on the high plane of these 
divine communications, from which he fell, all his 
subsequent degradation has had its stages exactly 
marked by the prior degree in which his knowledge 
of God has been clouded. The knowledge of God is 
the light of our inner life, and when this light grows 
dim or dies, the glory of great thoughts and noble 
deeds fades also and expires. I know not elsewhere 
so profound a statement of the law of history when 
men do not retain God in their knowledge, as Paul's 
in the first chapter of Komans : " Because that when 
they knew God they glorified him not as God, nei- 
ther were thankful, but became vain in their imagin- 
ations and their foolish heart was darkened. Profess- 
ing themselves to be wise they became fools, and 
changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an 
image like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four- 
footed beasts and creeping things. Wherefore God 
also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts 
of their own hearts." 

All this is quite contrary, I am well aware, to many 
current theories. I read in a late book by a noted 
author, " To believe that man was originally civilized 
and then suffered utter degradation in so many re- 



23 

gions, is to take a pitiably low view of human na- 
ture." But, alas, this is exactly the view which the 
sad facts of history oblige us to take, and we must 
square .our views of human nature to the actual facts 
of the case, whether or not it would better suit our 
desires and our theories to have them otherwise. All 
the facts of history point backward not to an original 
savage state, but, as the deep thinkers of antiquity 
in the pagan world were constantly declaring, to an 
original golden age of peace and purity. 

Aureus liaiic vitam in terris Saturnus agebat. 

Man became corrupt and degraded instead of being 
originally such, and as all his degradation comes from 
the darkness into which he plunges when he turns 
away from God, so it is not strange that his purity 
and upward progress are restored to him only as the_ 
light of God's communications shines again upon his 
soul. Here is not only the first impulse to human 
progress, but the only one which in our time, or pre- 
viously, has shown any permanent power. Wild, 
uncivilized, barbarous, savage people are changing 
to-day to a state of peace and purity and advancing 
civilization, not by commerce or conquest of arms, 
not by letters, or science, or the knowledge of the so- 
called useful arts, but by the simple preaching of the 
gospel, by the story of God's grace, which makes a 
man feel that he is a sinner, and gives him his first 
longing for a better state. He who does not see the 



24 

exhibitions of this now taking place on different parts 
of the. globe is blind to some of the most obvious and 
most important events of the present age. A naked, 
filthy savage, who has heard the story of the gospel 
and been brought to a living application of its strange 
truths, wishes at once to be clothed and clean, and 
becomes thus for the first time conscious of wants 
which his industry must relieve. Civilization, edu- 
cation, all progress starts with this inner quickening, 
which they could no more themselves originate than 
could the brooks which beautify the meadows, orig- 
inate the mountain springs from which they fl.ow. 
Clear observers now acknowledge the mistake of at- 
tempting to civilize a savage people through any 
other process than by a prior religious renovation. 
Plato saw this when he argued in The Sophist, that 
men merged in sensualism need to be improved be- 
fore they can be instructed, they must first become 
virtuous before they can be made intelligent. 

The basis and life of all our present civilization are 
clearly seen to be in the Christian spirit and the 
religious quickening it has wrought. It was not the 
capture of Constantinople by the Turks, and the con- 
sequent scattering of Greek scholars over Europe, 
which led to the modern revival of learning. And it 
was not the grander proportions which the natural 
world assumed through the discoveries of Columbus 
and Kepler, nor the new method furnished by Bacon 
for the instauration of the natural sciences which has 



25 

led to so vast an increase of the study of nature in 
these modern times. The light before which the 
I)ark Ages rolled away, and in which all the germs 
of our modern life have been quickened, was the 
dawn of the Reformation, which, long before the_ 
time of Luther, was falling on the vision of Tauler, 
and Eckhart, and Nicolas of Basle, and the Gottes- 
freunde, and the saintly men who wrote the Theolo- 
gia Germanica and the Imitation of Christ. 

And not only the dawn but the day of which we 
boast, has proceeded step by step from the clearer 
shining on the human soul of some truths which the 
Bible first revealed. It is a simple but most signifi- 
cant truth, that every stage of our modern progress 
has been preceded and inspired by a closer study of 
the Scriptures and a deeper reverence for them as 
the word of God. 

These historical facts will not surprise the profound 
student of human nature. To such a student not 
only are the religious feelings seen to spring from the 
deepest susceptibility of the soul, but they are seen 
also to form the very ground work of intellectual 
development. The first impulse to know is always 
a feeling. The thoughts of the intellect are started 
and sustained by the sentiments of the soul. But 

" These first affections, 
These shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what thej' may. 
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day. 
Are yet a masterlight of all our seeing," 
4 



26 

do not have their object, do not find their source in 
jfinite things. The knowledge of the finite, instead 
of producing, presupposes the knowledge of the in- 
finite. The disposition to measure and grasp the 
finite is not derived from the finite, for the finite, 
with no standard to measure, and no power to grasp 
itself, can originate no impulse to attempt these 
achievements. The first movement of thought, in so 
far as it differs from the thoughtless perceptions of 
the brute, is a movement to learn the ground and 
meaning of things. The first question asked by the 
human mind, and which also marks the mind's prog- 
ress in all its stages, is the question. Why. But this 
question never could be asked save for the deep con- 
viction that it could be answered. The disposition 
to seek the explanation of things could never arise 
but for the ineradicable conviction that the explana- 
tion can be found. But what does this imply when 
thoroughly considered ? An explanation needing 
itself to be explained does not answer the mind's in- 
quiries. These inquiries cease only when an ultimate 
and self-sufficient ground is reached. The mind rests 
only on what is itself at rest. But nature does not 
rest. Nothing in nature rests. Life in unnumbered 
generations rolling like a flood, light and heat pene- 
trating space in perpetual pulsations, the winds, the 
waves, the stars sweeping, swelling, circling in cease- 
less change, mark the restlessness of nature every- 
where. Up and down this realm of things the human 



27 

thought wanders in its inquiries, seeking rest and 
finding none. One inquiry only answered by an- 
other, one fact of nature expounded by a farther fact, 
which needs itself an explanation by something still 
bej^ond, keeps thought ever baflled, keeps its prod- 
ucts of philosophy and science ever tossing to and 
fro, and makes the mind in its thirst for truth like 
the traveler thirsting for water in the desert, before 
whose eye floats the distant mirage of flowing fount- 
ains and shining streams, which keeps beyond him as 
he travels toward it, and still mocks him with its de- 
lusion as he sinks exhausted in the sand. Only rea- 
son rests ; only the supernatural rests, and the human 
mind in its inquiries into nature in its eager search 
for the unseen meaning of the things it sees, finds 
joy and peace only when it finds the supernatural. 

But the supernatural marks the end no more than 
it does the beginning of the mind's inquiries. The 
supernatural is the alpha as well as the omega of the 
human thought. We never should be impelled to 
seek it but for its own stirrings already within us._ 
That which the thoughts of our intellect are striving 
to formulate is already present in the sentiments of 
the soul. The mind's pursuit of science and philos-- 
ophy is only its impulse to know what it already feels, 
is only its effort to become conscious of what is al- 
ready its unconscious possession. The saying of Les- 
sing is often quoted, "If the Almighty should hold 
out to me in His right hand all truth, and in His left 



28 

the search for truth, and deign to offer me which I 
would prefer, I would say, Lord, pardon the weakness 
of thy servant, yet grant me the search for truth 
rather than all truth." But could the human mind 
ever take such an attitude as this ? Could we ever 
choose a progress which has no goal save the endless 
repetition of its own steps, — a way like that of Sysi- 
phus rolling his stone up the steep mountain side, 
only to find it slipping from his grasp before it reached 
the summit, and ever rolling back into the valley 
again ? No, no, we seek that we may find. The hope 
without fruition dies, and the hopeless search would 
not be undertaken by one who knew its hopelessness. 
The search for truth is excited only by the love of 
truth, and the love of truth bears witness to the pres- 
ence of the truth within the soul, whose face that 
soul alone desires to see which has already felt its 
quickening embrace. But truth is inconceivable 
without God. Neither truth, nor beauty, nor good- 
ness would have any meaning, or be anything more 
than words, which the unthinking brute might speak 
as well as man, unless they point to Him and come 
^Jrom Him in whom all beauty, truth and goodness 
find alone their exhaustless and eternal source and 
sun. They are not God ; they are not parts of Him ; 
but they are revelations of Him in whom we live and 
move and have our being, who is not thus far from 
any one of us, and who declares something of His 
glory to the eye which he has opened to behold it in 



29 

these radiant expressions of Himself. We call him 
glorious, whether artist, sage or hero, who has seen 
and made known to us the glory of these divine 
manifestations, and we link his name with immortal 
renown. But the glory is not in what he is, but in 
what he beholds. This it is which has furnished him 
his exaltation, and his fame, and which continually 
suffices to 

" Disturb him with the joy of elevated thoughts, 
A sense sublime of something far more deeply interposed, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the deep blue sky, 
And on the mind of man." 

Thus the whole intellectual life hangs on what, in 
the most comprehensive sense, may be termed the 
religious life. Its original impulse comes from the 
religious life, and it will be strong and fruitful, only 
as this is profound and penetrating. That self-con- 
sciousness wherein we are distinguished from the 
brute, and in which the very being of reason consists, 
has not only as its constant attendant, but as • its es- 
sential prerequisite, the consciousness of God. " To 
know God," says Jacobi, " and to possess reason, are 
one and the same thing, just as not to know God and 
to be a brute are one and the same thing." This 
knowledge may be very vague ; its first dawnings 
may be so dim that they can hardly be discerned 
from the feelings out of which they rise ; it may 
often remain quite obscure, and may even be denied 
or derided by the very intellect which has derived 



80 

all its light and life therefrom, but the truth, still and 
forever remains that there can be no illumination of 
the intellect without a prior inspiration of the heart, 
and this inspiration of the heart is as meaningless 
and groundless without a divine impulse, as would be 
the light and warmth of earthly nature without the 
quickening presence of the sun. 

In all this I have only uttered what the deepest 
students of human nature have, in all ages, seen and 
acknowledged. The truth I have stated is, I think, 
exactly what Plato saw when he said, in The Republic, 
" In the same manner as the sun is the cause of sight, 
and the cause not merely that objects are visible, but 
also that they grow and are produced, so the good is 
of such power and beauty that it is not merely the 
cause of science to the soul, but is also the cause of 
being and reality to whatever is the object of science, 
and as the sun is not itself sight, or the object of 
sight, but presides over both, so the good is not 
science and truth, but is superior to both, they being 
not the good itself, but of a goodly nature." 

It is therefore not accidental that the actual his- 
torical progress of mankind in art, science, philoso- 
phy or virtue should depend, as we have seen, upon 
some religious impulse for its beginnings and continu- 
ance. Nor is it strange that schools and systems of 
education should have had no other source. It is 
only surprising when we fancy that the currents of 
progress can now be made to flow from any different 



31 

springs, or that the himp of learning can be lighted 
or kept burning with any other flame. If we are 
wise we shall not only learn, but be guided by lessons 
which history and human nature both teach, that 
education divorced from religion is like a tree severed 
from its nourishing roots, which thereby falls to the 
ground, leaving its leaves to wither, its fruit to per- 
ish, and itself to decay. From such folly we turn, 
leaving the blind to lead the blind, not doubting what 
the end to them both will be. 

What then are the practical consequences of this 
truth ? What adjustments does it require in the pro- 
cesses of our higher education? It requires, obvi- 
ously, that the corner stone and the top stone and 
the informing law of our whole educational fabric 
should be Christian faith and Christian freedom, the 
faith in which the true religious life finds its only 
sufficient root, and the freedom in which that same 
life finds its only adequate expression. We need 
Christian faith to perpetuate and perfect what Chris- 
ti-an faith has begun. For, even if the fabric built 
upon this basis could be kept standing when its foun- 
dations were removed, its increasing beauty and liv- 
ing growth would then be gone. A Christian college, 
therefore, looking not at transient but at permanent 
ends, sowing seed for a perennial harvest of the far- 
thest science and the fiiirest culture, will be solicitous, 
first of all, to continue Christian. If it is to be in the 
long run truly successful in the advancement of learn- 



32 

ins:, it will have the Christian name written not alone 
upon its seal and its first records, but graven in its life 
as ineff aceably as was the name of Phidias on Athene's 
shield. It will seek for Christian teachers and only 
these, — men in whom are seen the dignity and purity 
and grace of Christ's disciples, and whose lips instruct, 
while their lives inspire. It will order all its studies 
and its discipline that its pupils through the deep and 
permanent impulse of a life by the faith of the Son of 
God, may be led to the largest thoughts and kindled 
to the highest aims, with an energy undying and an 
enthusiasm which does not fade. It will not be 
ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, nor remiss in preach- 
ing that gospel to its students " till they all come in 
the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the 
Son of God unto a perfect man." 

But this is to be taken in no narrow sense. Chris- 
tian faith does not fetter, it emancipates the mind. 
"Just in proportion to its depth and power is its pos- 
sessor liberated from prejudice and superstition and 
all narrowness of thought. Christian faith is not only 
not hostile to free thought, but it finds its normal 
exercise and expression- in this very freedom. It is 
itself in such exact accord with all the original endow- 
ments and deepest instincts of the soul — whose foun- 
dations were not laid in falsehood — that it is only set- 
tled more firmly in its seat by free inquiry. It is only 
when the thought becomes fettered and is no longer 
free that it fails to return — over whatever field it 



33 

may have ranged — to the faith which has inspired 
it. 

In Raphael's famous School of Aiheiis the great 
artist has represented Plato looking upwards and 
pointing to the heavens, but holding in his hand as 
his most characteristic work, the Tima^us, wherein he 
seeks to bring upon the created earth the light of the 
imcreated heavens, while Aristotle, standing by his 
side, his eye lost in thought, but his fingers directed 
toward the earth clasps as his most significant trea- 
tise, the Ethica, wherein he would find the heavenly 
principle which should regulate the earthly life. The 
representation is worthy of the great genius who 
made it. Philosophy, where its inspiration is highest, 
and its investigations are deepest, reaches the same 
result, no matter in what direction it starts. Plato 
beginning with the heavens, looked so comprehen- 
sively that he saw the earth shining in the light of 
the skies, and Aristotle beginning with the earth, 
looked so deeply that he saw the heavens beneath it, 
the same heavens which Plato saw above. It is a 
mistake, though one often and easily made, to sup- 
pose that Plato and Aristotle only represent the 
opposite poles of idealism and empiricism. They 
differ in their method rather than in their end, for 
the idea, as Aristotle apprehended it, was just as 
much the object of his search, as of Plato's. They 
both agreed that the essence of the individual thing 
is in the idea, and that only ideas can be truly known. 



34 

And it is because of this original agreement, — this 
__original unity of insight and aim — that in the end 
which each reached, the method and results of the 
one were justified by the method and results of the 
other. 

In like manner Christian faith, if that be the object 
sought, may be reached by divers methods of inquiry, 
and we shall wisely welcome any tendency of thought, 
starting from whatever source and moving in what- 
ever direction, which has this faith for its presupposi- 
tion and is zealously bent upon discovering and declar- 
ing its sufficient grounds. Only that tendency of 
thought which divorces itself from God and the super- 
natural and the Christian atonement shall we wisely 
discard from our processes of education, and this not 
simply because such a tendency is untrue, but because 
it is necessarily empty and vain, because it has no 
power of permanent progress, and because the schools 
and systems of education left to its control, will be- 
come first superficial and formal and then barren and 
dead. We discard it just as Plato and Aristotle would 
both have discarded any speculations which did not 
presuppose and seek the idea as their starting point 
and goal, such speculations belonging, as Plato would 
'say, only to a world of darkness and shadows, and 
being, as Aristotle would say, of necessity fruitless 
and dead. A philosophy which should expend itself 
upon the natural and ignore the supernatural and the 
spiritual world, would be, according to Plato, only a 



35 

phantasm deluding our vision and vanishing at our 
touch, and a science which should content itself with 
looking into the earth without looking through it 
unto the heavens, Avould, according to Aristotle, be 
buried in Cimmerian darkness or lost in Tartarean 
fires. 

Gentlemen of the Trustees and the Faculty, Students 
and Friends of Amherst College : I take up the work 
assigned me, in the spirit, and with the aims I have 
thus endeavored to express. Far distant be the day 
when one intrusted with the interests of this institu- 
tion in any degree, should set before him any other 
than the lofty aim which has prevailed in the history 
of Amherst College from its beginning to the present 
time. To Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior, 
the College was originally dedicated, and to Him be it 
now again presented in a new consecration, ever liv- 
ing and all embracing. May He reign and ever be 
acknowledged in all its aifairs ! May He keep the 
College strong and progressive, and give it increasing 
power through the increasing strength of its faith in 
Him ! May this faith be so firmly fixed, and so in- 
telligently held that it shall be free and fearless in its 
exercise, emancipated from all intolerance and bigotry, 
showing itself in largest charity and sympathy, and 
giving speed and cheer to whatever seeks the knowl- 
edge of Christ, in whatever avenue the search be 
made, and yet, because it is a living and not a dead 
faith in Jesus Christ and his atonement, tolerating 



36 

nothing which makes its aim to set aside His claims ! 
May He guide continually the guardians of the Col- 
lege, and live in the life and speak through the lips 
continually of every teacher, and may all the students 
who, from the east and the west, the north and the 
south, shall throng these halls, be made complete in 
Him who is the head of all principalities and powers ! 
As the wise men from the East came and laid their 
gifts in adoring homage at the feet of the babe at 
Bethlehem, so may Amherst College ever show that 
the learning of the world, where it is highest, and 
deepest, and widest, and best, is content to sit at His 
feet and receive instruction from Him, who is not 
only wise but Wisdom, not only a true teacher but 
Himself the Truth, and whose words, which contain 
the sum of our faith, reach also, and ever beyond the 
summit of our philosophy ! 



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